


i forgive you

by girlmarauders



Category: Bandom, The Academy Is..., William Beckett - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Killjoys, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-24 23:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlmarauders/pseuds/girlmarauders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killjoys!AU. The man who was once called Bill Beckett took his daughter out into the desert because he thought it was a better life. Now he wonders if he was wrong.</p><p>He's worked his adult life trading information and selling stories to keep them alive and running. But the desert and his daughter are changing. He is starting to forget whe he came here and around him, others are forgetting too. Bill must make his final decision as a father and a human being.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i forgive you

**Author's Note:**

> The fantastic mix for this fic was done by theletterelle and is available for download or streaming [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/946079). I cannot reccomend downloading this highly enough. A truly amazing mix with so much obvious thought and work put into song choice and order and IT IS SUPER GOOD GO LISTEN.
> 
> The divine sylvaine truly outdid herself and created both digital and traditional medium art for this bigbang and all of it is available to see [here](http://sylvaine.dreamwidth.org/81541.html) . It is also all embedded in the written work. It is amazing and beautiful and sylvaine put so much work into it and right up against the deadline on the traditional media and did such an amazing job it takes my breath away. <3
> 
> Some of the killjoy names in this AU were drawn from inlovewithnight's [Keep The Car Running](http://archiveofourown.org/works/361372), although they are set in different universes.

_we have three names to know us by  
and mark our bodies when we die_

_two names you were given_  
 _first is secret, safe and hidden_  
 _second is louder, known by all_  
 _this is the name the runners call_  
 _your third name is louder still_  
 _the name on the lips of those you kill_

_we have three names to know us by  
and mark our body when we die_

&&&

Townie, later known as Disaster Boy – Gabe Saporta  
Daddy Longlegs, our narrator – Bill Beckett  
Queenie – Genevieve Beckett  
The Green Gentleman – Ryan Ross  
Never-Never Land – Pete Wentz  
Hurricane – Spencer Smith  
Shutter – Jon Walker  
Angelbreath, later known as The Ringmaster - Brendon Urie  
Bumblebee – Bebe Rexha  
Runaway – Sierra Kusterbeck  
The Butcher – Andy “The Butcher” Mrotek  
Dr. Feelgood – Travis McCoy  
Siren – Greta Morgan  
Kobra Kid – Mikey Way  
Dreamkiller – Victoria “Vicky-T” Asher

&&&

&&&

Bill was 19 when he came to the desert with 200 credits worth of electronics and a 10 month old baby he called Queenie. Her mother was dead, hung from the stairwell of a Jezebel house by her bed sheet, and only Bill was alive to remember the baby’s name.

He’d hopped on the first refugee convoy out of the gutters and into the desert. No one patrolled the edge of the city then and Bill never saw the gutters again. It’s in his lungs, the tell-tale wheeze of someone who grew up in gutter smog, and in his brain. City people think sideways. The desert kids, born and raised on the sand, think straight and in black and white absolutes. Bill can always pick out city folk, even when they try and hide. The Green Gentleman’s black-haired lover was once a Ritalin rat and the girl who runs for Never-Never Land grew up in the Jezebel houses. It’s in the eyes; Bill always knows.

Queenie grew up out here but he’s never let her forget that she was born on the concrete of the gutters. They sing the city hymns together, in the cold desert nights, and Bill remembers the street fires and riots, the smell of tear gas and poverty. The gutter towns are dying out, forced underground as Blind spreads its influence. It’s been four years since a refugee caravan came into the desert. Even in the city, people are starting to forget.

Bill’s not a runner. He doesn’t fight the good fight; he’s not a revolutionary. He has too much at stake. But he does think there is a small rebellion in remembering, in remembering that the city once stood for something. It is important, he thinks, to remember that there used to be _things_ in the desert, things that preyed on people, and that it was the city that used to be safe.

&&&

Bill hadn’t known how to drive when he came to the desert.

“You can’t _drive_?” shrieks Disaster when he finds out. He hadn’t been Disaster then. The runners had called him Townie, their frowns tinted with distrust. He was the runner who clung most fiercely to memories of the city, who took his lovers from the refugee caravans that still came regularly into the desert. They hadn’t been friends then either. Townie was his lover, his protector, the runner who spoke for this stranger from the city, still green from the refugee caravan and eking out his existence at a safe station, not yet settled in the desert. Bill didn’t trust him; they didn’t trust each other, but that was the way the desert went.

Bill hikes Queenie, still a solemn and quiet baby, higher up on his hip and frowns. They’re standing outside, on the dust, where runners’ cars are parked haphazardly around the safe station. Townie owns an old grey pick-up and a long lean motorbike. He prefers the motorbike; more showy.

“There aren’t any roads in the gutters. What was I supposed to learn?” He says defensively. Townie makes a face, as if he’d forgotten the claustrophobic alleys of the gutter town or as if he’d never known them. Not for the first time, Bill wonders which part of the city his new protector came from.

“Everybody learns to drive,” Townie says stubbornly. “What the hell did you learn instead?”

Bill shrugs with one shoulder, as much as he’s able to while he’s holding Queenie.

“Stealing,” He says. Townie frowns.

“Don’t try that out here. No one to steal from except runners and they’ll cut anyone who steals from their own.”

Bill tries not to let his face show any emotion. He knows all his skills are useless out here.

“They call you Daddy Longlegs, don’t they?” Townie says, his eyes dancing.

Bill doesn’t respond.

“That’s a spider name. You were a thief.” It’s not a question.

Bill nods.

“I earned that name,” He says, because he did and he refuses to be ashamed of what was a badge of honour in the city. Screw this desert and screw these people and their fucking honour system. It was the spiders who fed the gutter town when Blind didn’t send rations, spiders who fed families who would have otherwise starved. He doesn’t have anything to be ashamed of.

Townie nods.

“Must have been good work.”

“It was,” Bill says and tries not to tighten his grip on Queenie. She’s a quiet baby, well-behaved to a fault, but she does have her limits. She snuffles slightly, making quiet baby noises.

“Well,” Townies says. It’s a filler word, talking just to fill the air. The runners call it “using up oxygen” and Bill’s heard it shouted more than once at Townie in the bar of the safe station, Townie being told over and over to stop using up oxygen. Desert people only talk when they have to.

“You should learn how to drive,” Townie says, kicking at the wheel of his pickup. Bill shakes his head.

“I can’t learn with Queenie in the car.”

Townie looks around them, arms outspread. The desert is wide-open, nothing for miles.

“What are you going to hit?” Townie says and Bill flushes with embarrassment. “She’s gonna be a desert girl, Longlegs, she should grow up in a car.”

Bill frowns.

“Fine. But you’re buying dinner tonight,” He says.

Townie smirks.

“Aren’t I always?”

&&&

Townie takes Bill out into the desert and they sleep under the stars; all three of them tucked up together under whatever blankets and cover they can find. Queenie is a quiet baby who rarely cries and eats whatever Bill gives her. He worries but she takes her first steps on the desert floor without problems, babbles away seriously in her baby-language and generally seems unaffected by the world’s attempts to skew her development.

“You worry about her too much,” Townie says, one night on the edge of their campfire. He’s smoking a rare hand-rolled cigarette, sitting with his back against the wheel of the pickup truck. Bill is nervously shepherding Queenie’s faltering steps at a safe distance from the fire. Bill gives him a sharp look.

“C’mon Longlegs,” Townie says. “She’s just a baby. Even really stupid people manage to raise those things.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Bill snaps. Queenie holds his hand tightly, cooing brightly at the fire. Townie rolls his eyes and exhales a thin stream of smoke. Queenie giggles and bats at the rising smoke with her tiny baby hands. Bill sighs.

&&&

Townie leaves them eventually, taking a job out on the other side of the zones. Queenie’s four and precocious, spoiled rotten by Townie’s refusal to treat her as anything else but a tiny adult. He leaves them the battered grey truck, and Bill takes them to the Southern zones for the winter, passing between homesteads and settlements.

He passes on information, shares stories and songs, and soon discovers that many are willing to trade a night’s rest, safety, food or gasoline for news from afar or a story of the city.

Bill was probably not the first person to eke out an existence based off the information he could sell, but he was the first one in the smallness of the desert to give it a name, to call himself a trader and to peddle his wares across the desert.

&&&

 

&&&

The hottest day of the year, when sand storms rattle through the desert ridges and the heat can dry the moisture out of your eyeballs, finds them hiding in the Southern desert.

He and Queenie hole up on semi-derelict homestead, helping the family who lives there corral their desert goats. The homesteaders’ house is made of bricks, built so tight up against a ridge that its westward walls are desert stone.

The southern zones are far enough beyond the reach of the city that people can afford to stay in one place, settle down, even start a family. The homesteaders are a young couple. The man tends the sheep and goats, while the woman makes milk, cheese, grows shrubby little plants in the shade of the ridge and looks after their small, doe-eyed son.

Queenie runs around in the swept-dirt yard, playing mysterious games with the boy and covering herself with dust and sweat. Bill, attired much the same in dust and sweat collected while gathering the animals, sits on the homesteader’s back porch and watches. The city feels a million miles away and the tiny brick house a castle, where Bill can pretend that his daughter is safe.

That night, when the sand storms rage about the house, Queenie crawls into Bill’s arms where he lays on the miserable pallet that was all the homesteaders had been able to provide.

“I’m scared,” She whimpers and Bill tightens the circle of his arms, feeling how small his daughter is within them. He does not fear the storms, knowing that there is nothing he can do to divert them, no prayer he could say if the storm chose to take him. Queenie’s mother had believed in the desert gods, had gone dutifully to the chapel on the edge of the city every week. When she had money, she even left gasoline, canned food or precious cigarettes on the altar.

“Don’t be scared,” Bill says quietly, digging at his memories for the superstitions that had sustained Christine. He hopes they work against the howling of the sand outside. “Your mother’s in the storm.”

Queenie gasps, a tiny exhalation of breath from her child’s form. Bill smiles and knows it’s unseen in the dark.

“She’s in the storm? But she’s dead.”

“I know,” Bill says, “but when people we love die, they go into the storms. And they always come to find us.”

“Because they love us?” Queenie whispers. Bill nods and squeezes her. He misses Christine. Sometimes he wishes he had died in the city and Christine had taken Queenie to the desert. He can no longer envision or remember a world in which they are both alive.

“Yes, because they love us.” Bill says. “You should never be afraid of the storms. They protect us from the Draculas in the city. We’re the people of the desert. The storms are our friends.”

Queenie nods.

“I understand,” She says seriously, laying her head on Bill’s chest and closing her eyes. Bill waits until she falls asleep before he closes his own.

&&&

Bill estimates there can’t be more than a thousand people in the desert. He can’t be certain but he’s probably the closest thing the zones have to a census. He usually guesses in the high hundreds, with a few hundred runners, an even smaller handful of DJs and a motley collection of refugees, homesteaders and small communities of like minded people. There are a couple of other traders, although none with his memory.

&&&

 

 

 

 

&&&

Queenie takes the jump into the back of the pickup at a flat out run. Bill winces when he hears her knees collide with the back gate but he doesn’t slow down. He throws himself bodily into the cab and turns the key, slamming his foot down on the clutch just in time to stop it stalling. He’d parked in second.

Queenie bangs on the cab and shouts, shooting blind over her shoulder. Bill shoves the tired gearbox into first and slams on the gas. The engine screams at it but he skips second to get to third and skips fourth for fifth. There’s no way to out manoeuvre Draculas in the open desert. They either have to be faster or better shots. Queenie’s a good shot and Bill’s not a bad driver but every time they meet up with a raid it’s a coin toss which way it’ll go.

Bill fumbles for the short range radio propped on the dash and shouts into it before he’s even brought it to his mouth.

“Attention zonerunners, this is Daddy Longlegs and Queenie, we’ve hit a Drac raid southbound on Route Jericho. Anyone within range?”

The radio crackles dishearteningly and Bill swerves sharply left when a Drac tries to pull his bike up alongside the truck. Queenie dives flat as laser blasts burst just over her head.

“Hold tight Longlegs, we’re two clicks north of you, we’re on our way,” Says a fuzzy voice over the radio and Bill resists the urge to punch the air, knowing he can’t take his hands off the wheel at this speed.

There’s a thump as Queenie throws herself bodily around the truckbed and the grating scream of lazer blasts. Bill doesn’t recognise the voice on the radio.

“Callsign?” He asks, veering sharply right.

“The Green Gentleman and his crew,” says the voice. “Cutting radio now, we’ve got eyes on you.”

A cloud of dust appears above a low, shrubby rise west of the road. Seconds later bikes speed over the small hill. They’re painted in red and white squares and Bill doesn’t recognise the helmet designs, which worries him. He’s known the names and designs of the active runners since Queenie was a toddler.

Some of the Dracs peel away from the truck to deal with the new runners. He hears Queenie whoop with blood-thirsty joy when she catches a Drac in the chest with a laser blast, sending him across the desert dirt, still tangled in his bike.

The new runners deal with the Dracs efficiently and Bill makes a mental note that they’re not using laser battery or bike gas unnecessarily. They’re probably a new crew, without the kind of fire power the older, crews have built up.

He pulls the truck around in a wide circle to meet the runners where the majority of Dracs have fallen. A few of them are ghosting, their bodies fading as their soul, or what’s left of it, goes wandering. One of the runners, his visor pushed up on his helmet, is slitting the throats of those who are either still alive or died too quickly to have time to ghost. Another has kneeled to begin stripping bikes for parts.

Bill steps out of the truck and he hears the soft thud of Queenie jumping out of the truck bed. She doesn’t holster her weapon, not until they hear their rescue price.

Bill spreads his hands in what he hopes is a non-threatening manner.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting The Green Gentleman before,” He says slowly. He runs his eyes over the four runners, cataloguing weapons, physical appearance and dress. This crew is dressed eclectically, layered scarves and ruffles over utilitarian leather boots and goggles. All male, no children.

“Save your games, Spider,” says one of the runners harshly, pointing his laser at Bill. He’s kept his visor down, maybe out of suspicion or maybe out of embarrassment. Judging by his stance and dress, he’s still hiding baby fat.

Queenie shifts her feet on the desert floor, a soft and vaguely threatening rasping sound.

“Cool it Hurricane,” says the runner still sitting on his bike. The bike lends him body but he’s still built like a twig. The runner he called Hurricane pauses, as if trying to prove he doesn’t have to follow orders, but then lowers his laser.

The runner on the bike dismounts and extends his hand to Bill.

“I am the Green Gentleman. This is my crew, Hurricane, Shutter and Angelbreath,” He says, shaking Bill’s hand firmly. The runners salute lazily as they’re named and Bill glances over them quickly. Angelbreath has finished slitting Drac throats and blood is splattered on his young, grim face. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet the Daddy Longlegs and his Queenie.”

The Green Gentleman bows slightly to Queenie. She says nothing. He nods at the untouched Drac and bike that she’d shot, several feet away on the desert floor.

“He is yours,” he says, “to do with as you will, as is the bike.” He turns to Bill, his voice businesslike. “Now, to the rescue price. We are in need of the sale of some information.”

Bill shrugs, trying to appear nonchalant.

“You’re talking to the right trader,” he says, “What exactly were you hoping to sell?”

“A reputation,” says the Green Gentleman. “My crew runs a 150 acre territory in Zones 4 & 5, including southbound Route Jericho and the Marina oasis. I would like it known that we are not to be trifled with.”

Bill nods. He’s had his services as an information trader employed like this before.

“That’s an impressive territory,” he says. The Diamond sisters used to spin tunes out of the Marina oasis but their station went static six months ago and no one’s heard from them since. Their crew of runners was good but erratic and it’s common opinion that they turned on each other, not unheard of in the quieter zones. “I’ll trade you the new Drac codes for news of the previous owners.”

The Green Gentleman smiles smoothly.

“Unfortunately we don’t have any news, the territory was unguarded when we came to it,”

Bill smiles ruefully.

“Worth a shot,” He says. He also makes a mental note about how the runner called Shutter stiffens and the smoothness of the Green Gentleman’s lie. He’s good but he’s not good enough. Bill’s been shifting through lies since before this Gentleman first set foot on the sand.

“So I cook up some suitably scary stories about the new crew running the Marina territory as rescue price?” Bill says, rubbing his hands together. The Green Gentleman nods. “Can I ask if you run for a DJ?”

News of a new DJ and their broadcasts would buy him and Queenie supplies for months. The Green Gentleman shakes his head.

“We run our own rebellion,” he says, as if offended by the concept. Bill shrugs and spits into his palm, extending his hand.

“Done is done,” he says and The Green Gentleman slaps his palm. They shake on it. Bill looks them over one final time.

“I’m heading the way of Never-Never Land,” he says, “if you’ve got messages. Last I heard, he was still broadcasting.”

The runner called Angelbreath stands and sheathes his knife.

“I have a message.” He says. His eyes are shifty with the telltale flicker of a Ritalin rat. It shakes Bill, to see that so far from the city. This boy is too young to have come into the desert with a refugee caravan. “ ‘For in this night I served an angel of the Lord who stood with me’, just like that.”

Bill nods and repeats the message. Hurricane turns away, as if embarrassed by his comrade’s fervour.

“Desert take your footprints,” says Shutter and lifts a gloved hand in farewell. Bill barely checks his flinch. ‘Desert take your footprints,” was an old farewell even when Bill came to the desert. New crews haven’t used it since the massacre.

“Good luck,” he says, nodding. The crew mount their bikes and are gone over the nearest sandy rise, leaving the gritty taste of their dust trail in Bill’s mouth.

Him and Queenie drag the crashed bike into the back of the truck and cover the fallen Dracs with sand. They both murmur quick prayers for the souls that had inhabited the bodies of the Dracs. Long years of travelling together have taught them to perform these rituals quickly and without unnecessary talking. They’re back on the road before the sun has even begun to dip behind the far off mountains.

&&&

Three days later they enter Never-Never Land’s territory. Never-Never’s territory is one of the oldest in the zones, but his grip on it is tenuous. His broadcasts were once steady but his runner crew disappeared two years ago and now a new unknown, a runner called Bumblebee, tries to maintain control of one of the biggest and most notorious territories in the Northern zones. She’s been partially successful, cutting deals with the larger safe stations that control the Eastern Slave Road and chasing off upstart runner crews but she’s trying to protect the Zones’ most famous DJs on her own.

Bill’s met her a couple times. He and Pete go way back. He wasn’t in the Northern zones when Pete’s crew disappeared, although he still collects rumours about them, as a favour to an old friend. They’re not worth much in trade but Bill’s lived this long as a trader by believing that every piece of information would someday be worth something to _someone_.

They barely miss the first booby trap about six clicks over the territory border. If they’d hit it, it would have flipped their car and seriously injured them, maybe killed them. As it is, Queenie’s driving and she sees the miniscule difference in the sand patterns that makes her swerve away and miss the pressure trigger. Bill stills his fast-beating heart and thanks the desert gods worshipped by Queenie’s mother that Queenie learned her driving from a sandrat and not from an immigrant like he did. They keep driving.

Bumblebee pulls up on her yellow and black bike just before the second booby trap. She recognizes the truck, so at least she doesn’t pull her laser on him right off. Bill takes that as a courtesy.

“Good to see you still breathing,” Bill says, through the opened window of the truck. “How goes the old man?”

Bumblebee shrugs and the grimy yellow baseball cap pulled over her wild hair shadows any facial expression.

“He still goes,” she says. “Follow me.”

She revs her bike engine and speeds off away from the main track. Queenie makes a face, always more aware of what the truck can take than Bill and turns to follow Bumblebee.

“Dad?” She says, when Bumblebee’s back in sight. He makes a noise, indicating he’s listening. “Do you think Never-Never will go static?” She sounds stoic, unconcerned, but Bill taught her how to lie and she’s never been good enough to get past him.

Bill sighs.

“He’ll go static one day,” He says, after thinking out what he wants to say. “Not even Never-Never can live forever. And he’s had the exterminators gunning for him since the Infinity broadcast. ” He pauses. It’s easy to forget that Queenie is only thirteen, not yet a woman by desert standards. Her mother was working in a Jezebel house by the time she was thirteen. Bill was a known spider by then. Children grew up fast in the city. Queenie’s had to grow up fast as well, just the two of them in desert, but Bill’s in no hurry for her to grow old, to become the hard, unhappy woman her mother had been at the end.

“You see it sometimes, in DJs like Never-Never. Their name gets too big, their territory too well known. Runners won’t protect them because of old griefs, fear, whatever. Sometimes they burn out, get too ambitious, go down in a hail of glory. Sometimes they just disappear, exterminated, ghosted, maybe just changed their name and territory and moved on.”

The bright yellow blur that is Bumblebee changes direction up ahead of them.

“He’s lucky to have Bumblebee. I’ve known precious few runners who could protect a territory like this without a crew.” He glances over at her. “Tell me, which other runners do we know of that run solo?”

Queenie rolls her eyes.

“Daaaaad,” she whines, “C’mon, really?”

Bill smiles but keeps his voice firm.

“You never know what information you’ll be called on for and when. You want to live, you remember everything.”

“Fine,” she says, only a little grumpily. “There’s the Bumblebee, first time runner for Never-Never Land. Apple Tree’s run Zone Six solo since his partner died in a sandstorm. Mouse Trap contracts solo runs out of safe stations on the Greater Southern Trailway. Dropkick runs the Anaconda territory for the Snake Lady. There’s word out she may be running with another woman, but it might be that the Snake Lady’s dropped the disks and picked up a bike. Ave Maria runs solo but she’s based out of the Virginia settlement.”

Bill nods.

“Well done. You forgot Triggerfinger and Burner,” He points out. Queenie snorts.

“C’mon, they run together more than they run apart. You can’t count them.”

“I’ll count them as long as they continue to patrol different territories and serve different DJs,” He says sternly. “Details are important, Queenie.”

She rolls her eyes and Bill sighs. It’s a familiar annoyance, his daughter’s blasé attitude to the skills that can keep a trader alive. As she ages, he’s become more and more aware of his growing fear that she will put herself in harm’s way, fall in with a sub-par runner crew, get caught unarmed by a Drac raid or, worst of all, become a DJ.

Bill’s got nothing against DJs themselves. Hell, some of his best friends are DJs. But being a DJ is like painting a giant target on your back and waiting for the exterminators to come and find you. He’s dragged himself and his daughter around this gods-cursed desert for nigh on thirteen years and only a handful of the DJs who were broadcasting when he came to the desert are still alive.

Never-Never Land’s broadcast station is hidden in the shadows of a rocky ridge facing east. After a pause, Bill realises that the ridge doesn’t just hide the station, it is the station. Never-Never’s dug straight into the rock wall, expanding on already existing caves and adding paths and steps. Bill never seen anything so permanent in the desert.

Bumblebee lets them pull their truck into a large, flat-bottomed cave and pulls corrugated sheet metal over the entrance. She gestures at a series of steps that climb up into the ridge.

“He’s up there,” she says. “Good luck pulling him away from his disks. If you can get him sober, tell him I’m still breathing.”

She has hard, dark eyes, sensuous but unforgiving. The daughter of a Jezebel house does not forget.

Bill takes the steps two at a time, but with Queenie always a step ahead of him. The tunnel staircase turns and quickly opens out into the open hair, becoming little more than steps carved into the rock face. The wind whips at them, pulling at their clothes and playing with their balance. Queenie laughs and sprints the rest of the way into the stone cave. Bill concentrates on his feet and each individual step, watching Queenie’s dirty-blonde hair disappear into the cave’s entrance.

&&&

Pete’s eyes still flicker like a Rat’s, even now. It’s been over ten years since Pete left the city and the drugs that kept him awake but his eyes still flicker, like a candle guttering in the wind.

He stands from his DJ chair to embrace Queenie and she kisses his cheek.

“I brought new tunes,” Queenie says, waving a memory Bill didn’t know she had. Pete grins.

“Good work, little one. Why don’t you plug in?”

Queenie grins and grabs a headset before Bill can even protest.

“Since when has she carried tunes for you?” Bill says, by way of greeting. He hugs Pete but he’s a little angry. He’s always tried to keep Queenie away from DJs and their self-sabotage.

“Since she came to the desert, brother,” Pete says. “We all carry the tunes, our hearts remember.”

Bill frowns, but only slightly. Queenie’s already got her headphones on, playing around on Pete’s cobbled together electronics.

“Bumble sends her greetings,” Bill says, as Pete sits back down in his wheeled chair. “She says you’re back on the flicker pills.”

Pete snorts.

“Bee’s too young to know what a flicker pill is,” He says, pushing his chair away from Bill with the toes of his worn sneakers.

“She’s not my runner.” He says, with a shrug. “I’ve moving boards from Dreamkiller, if you’ve got trade for them.”

Pete grins wildly.

“Damn straight I’ve got something for them.” He wheels over to a cannibalised computer screen and keyboard, and pulls up a few windows. “They’re from Dreamkiller, you’re certain?”

Bill nods.

“I spoke to her kid myself,”

Pete pauses, turning from his computer screen quickly enough that Bill’s neck twitches in sympathy.

“Really?” He says. “How’s his memory?”

Bill shakes his hand in a so-so motion.

“Spotty. He’s got his name and enough bits and pieces that he gets along.”

Pete raises his eyebrows in interest but turns back to the computer screen.

“If you get me the boards, I’ll see what I’ve got that you can take in trade.” He says, the keyboard clacking. “Queenie!” he shouts, leaning over to pull at her headset.

She flinches at the sudden change in sound but pulls off a single ear cover.

“What?”

“Finish up that song and then run and grab the boards your dad brought me,”

She nods, but quickly puts the headphones back on. Pete, in turn, turns back to his keyboard.

“What brought you past me anyway? You haven’t been out East since the Dracs changed codes.” He says, his keyboard clacking.

Bill hunches his shoulders and looks at Queenie, absorbed in the music.

“She turned 13 a couple months ago. I’ve been putting it off but her mother was a believer, it’s what she would have wanted.”

“What? You’re going on pilgrimage?” Pete says.

Bill smiles ruefully.

“Yeah, if she wants to. For her mother.”

Pete stops typing.

“She meant that much to you?” Pete asks. Bill wishes he could see Pete’s face; the back of his head is unreadable. He opens his mouth to respond but shuts it when Queenie shifts and then stands, pulling the headphones off her head reluctantly. She flashes a smile at Bill and bounds towards the cave opening. He catches in his memory the impression of teeth, yellowed and dirtied by desert sand.

Pete turns in his chair and stares after Queenie for a moment, his eyes slightly unfocused.

“What was she called again?” He asks. Bill knows he’s not talking about Queenie.

“That’s right,” Bill says quietly. “You made yourself forget.”

Pete blinks and at least has the decency to look ashamed. Bill sighs.

“Her name was Christine, remember?”

Pete smiles, although crookedly.

“No, Longlegs, I don’t remember. You trust me with her name?”

Bill leans against one of Pete’s consoles and tucks his hands into his pockets. The light that comes through the cave opening is low and the air is thin and clear, above the constant movement of desert sand.

“You’ll forget, won’t you?” Bill says, shrugging. Pete looks down and away, silent until the pressure in the room is too much for Bill to bear.

“I’ve got some messages to pass on. If Bumble wants it, I’ve got data on a new crew near your borders and some other bits and pieces for sale.” Bill says, feeling old sand crackle between his teeth.

Pete shrugs and turns his chair, pulling himself up to one of his decks. There is a thin layer of dust over everything and cobwebs on a few of the DJ decks. Pete’s never been tidy but he’s always been obsessive about his decks, to the point of compulsion. Bill’s never seen them like this.

“Keep your messages.” He says. “Bee will want the data. See if she’s got anything in trade for you.”

Bill straightens and takes his hands out of his pockets.

“I took those messages in good faith.” He says quietly. “I was told that Never-Never was still broadcasting.”

“He forgot what he needed to say,” Pete says tensely, his shoulders hunched. He runs a twitching hand through his gelled hair and Bill’s sure that if he could see Pete’s eyes, they’d be flickering with an info injection like he was back in the city again. Bill closes his eyes for a moment, just to feel the way they hold still behind his eyelids, the desert breeze against his skin, the sound of sand shifting far away.

“You got your words from somewhere,” Bill says fiercely, his eyes still closed. He believes in very little but he remembers a Never-Never Land who believed in a lot. “You shouldn’t waste them.”

“I’m not wasting them,” Pete says guardedly, swivelling in his chair and pushing away from the computer monitor. Bill snorts.

“You’ve sat up here letting yourself forget and reduced the Bumblebee to cutting deals with sand grubbers. You’re sitting ducks up on the rocks. You wanna get yourself killed, do it on your own time.”

“You think I’m gonna get the Bumblebee killed?” Pete says hostilely. “That girl’s got eyes in the back of her head and more sense than a sandshrew. She’ll outlive me.”

“Do you even remember her name?” Bill shoots back. Pete sits back in his chair too fast and it moves a few inches on its creaky wheels. “Don’t play stupid with me, I know she told you.”

“I didn’t think you were her friend,” Pete says in a barely restrained snarl. Bill can see his teeth.

“I’m not,” Bill says, “but she sold me her old smuggler route out of the city not to sell that information.”

“Brainbugs,” Pete says and spits on the floor. Bill shrugs. He doesn’t mind the insult. He’s heard worse and it’s certainly not worse than people throwing “spider” back in his face. Memories of the city aren’t important in the desert, and no one cares that being a spider was a title that came with dignity.

“Fuck you,” Bill says, on principle. “Talk with your runner, clean the cobwebs off your decks, give me some fucking trade for my motherboards and Queenie and I’ll listen out for your next broadcast.”

Pete closes his eyes briefly, like a long blink. Bill almost expects to see the old reflection of a data dream from the streams in the city.

“Get out.” Pete bites out. His teeth clack. There’d been a girl in the gutters who got the fingers on her left had cut off by a junkie jocky who ate them raw in front of her.

Suddenly, the cave mouth falls into shadow and Queenie bounds into the room with the long-legged stride that Bill knows so mirrors his own. Pete twitches in surprise and his hand makes an aborted movement in the direction of his own laser. Bill’s not concerned; Never-Never Land is famous for being a terrible shot.

Queenie dump an armful of carefully wrapped electronics onto the nearest clear surface and shoots a smile at Pete.

“They’re worth a week’s worth of canned food, at the very least,” She says, although the words are dulled by her smile. It’s never occurred to Bill to try and train it out of her. If the desert couldn’t do it; he certainly can’t.

&&&

Bumblebee sets them up in a small cave, set several feet above the ground, although at least it opens out into the open air. There’s a warren of caves dug into the ridge, but being too far from the sun makes Bill’s skin crawl.

Bill was born three floors below ground, in squalid, wailing poverty. He was six before he saw the sun and even then it was the weak and filtered light that passed between the high leaning buildings of the gutter and the even higher air pollution. His mother, who he does not remember, had kept him underground until he was too old, too poor and too malnourished to be taken away by Scarecrow. Babies could be rescued, it was held, because when they were made to look like everyone else, you could never tell that they’d ever been anyone else. But once you’d lived in the gutters for a few years, you never lost the look.

He doesn’t know what the city is like now but there’d been rebellion there too, before anyone ever came to the desert.

Queenie explores the caves with Bumblebee and Bill sleeps, hard, for the first time in months. When he wakes, he can see Queenie’s shadowy form breathe, fast asleep beside him. Bumblebee’s sat against the cave wall, her arms propped on bent knees. The light is soft and grey, either twilight or pre-dawn, and everything within the cave sits in shadow.

“Will you take a message for me?” Bumblebee asks, very quietly. Sitting up slowly, Bill nods.

“I can’t guarantee it’ll get where it’s going,” He whispers, hoping not to wake Queenie. “But I’ll carry it for a while.”

Bumblebee nods.

“Thank you,” She says. “I’m looking for my sister. They used to call her Runaway, just...just tell her Bumblebee’s looking for her.”

Bill sighs but nods.

“I won’t remember it forever,” he says sadly, wishing he could. Bumblebee shrugs.

“I know,” She says, “Just carry it as far as you can.”

Bill pulls himself up further and crawls over to the cave wall. He leans up against it, close enough to talk to Bumblebee quietly but far enough away to not crowd her. The stone floor is laid with soft sand, and Queenie’s dug herself a small comfortable hollow to sleep in.

“He doesn’t remember your name,” Bill murmurs. He gives Bumblebee credit for not flinching.

“I know,” She says. Bill’s surprised to hear that she doesn’t sound angry, just indifferent.

“Why did you tell him?” He asks, crossing his legs and listening to the sound of the sand moving. It’s impossible to see Bumblebee’s face in the grey light.

“I thought I loved him,” She says, her voice rough with the unfairness of it all.

“Do you?” Bill asks.

He can hear her pause audibly. She runs a single gloved hand over her face and it could be the poor light, but it appears to tremble.

“I don’t know. I think I forgot.”

&&&

Bill’s body is dotted with scars, a constant reminder that he is getting old. The skin of his back is pitted with ugly scar tissue, ripped apart in a bike skid that nearly killed him. He’d convalesced in a poorly dug pit of a safehouse on the Eastern Slave Road; Queenie lived with The Butcher for most of her seventh year. It was there she learned to drive, to fire a laser, to grow to be a better desert rat than Bill had ever learned to be.

He is watching Queenie slowly collect her own scars. He could almost justify them more if they were battle scars, collected while defending herself, but the sad truth is that most of them are the endless wear of life in the desert. Her right eyebrow grows around a thin scar from a fall when she was ten and her knees are hardened caps of scar tissue. The warped and sickly smooth skin of her left ankle is a motorcycle burn from years ago. Disaster tells him people in the city used to live to fifty but he’s never known a runner to get past 35 with all their limbs and thought processes intact.

&&&

Heading east takes you slowly up into the highlands, where the desert fills with shrubs and rocks and snakes. The lack of dust and sand is pleasant after years of gritty food, no matter how well you wash, but the uptick in snakes gives Bill the shivers. Queenie loves it. Bill doesn’t like the plants or the rocks but he likes the sensation of distance from the city. Not that it matters, Draculas have raided the far eastern zones before.

The crossroads are dotted with small traveller’s shrines, decorated with graffiti of open eyes with long eyelashes, the desert sun and the map of the zones, stripped down to be nothing more than a symbol. Bill stops at the ones he recognizes and leaves what he can.

On the fifth day, they make camp in the shadow of a tall sun symbol. Bill spreads their makeshift bedrolls out beneath the truck and piles blankets against the night’s coming cold. By the time he’s finished, Queenie has a small campfire going and has two cans of beans set just inside the flames to cook.

“I remember,” Queenie says, always dangerous words to say unprotected in the desert, “that my mother never saw the desert.”

Bill checks over his shoulder but sees no approaching shadows, nothing coming for them. Maybe the shrines hold his fears at bay.

“She didn’t. The gods aren’t _of_ the desert, they’re _from_ the desert. The city was built from the desert.” He waits, seeing if Queenie will get it.

“Its people had to come from somewhere,” She says slowly, the thought taking its time to reach her. She pauses. “They didn’t forget?”

Bill runs a hand through his hair and sighs. He has always strived to do his best by Queenie but it is sometimes overwhelmingly difficult to explain the city to a child who has never known a settlement bigger than a few shoddy homesteads. How to explain the fidelity of memory to a child who has never known it to be anything but fleeting?

“It’s harder to forget, or easier to remember, in the city.” He says. “I don’t know why. Disaster thinks it’s the wind.”

Queenie doesn’t mention it, or speak, until the morning, long after they’ve watched the sun both set and rise. Bill has Queenie leaves the ash of their fire in the cans with the beans leftovers in front of the sun shrine. He raised his daughter not to offend strange gods.

&&&

Six weeks later, Draculas blow up the Baron’s way station and Bill moves a family of refugees from the fall out to an only mildly safer settlement. Nobody is hurt (even the Baron got out) but Bill is fearful. The Baron was neither a big target or a trouble maker. His broadcast’s were confined to traffic reports and his way station doubled as a triage centre. He was also incredibly far out in the zones. The Draculas are getting bolder.

&&&

They spend the next month running surveillance loops through the middle zones, tracking Dracula patrols and intercepting their transmissions. Queenie’s no good at the codes but, after living with The Butcher, she’s a good tracker. She drives and follows tire tracks while Bill listens to the nonsense sounds the Draculas murmur through a hacked-up info jack plugged into a radio receiver.

It’s boring work but the winter is coming and they need something to sell. Bill’s been spreading the news of the new crew in the Marina territory and while Bill’s opinion of them pays well enough, they need supplies. The Draculas are moving further out into the zones, spreading out their sphere of influence from the city and out onto the sands.

People are afraid, especially the civilians who scratch out livings in the middle zones because they don’t know anything else. The DJs and runners refuse to evacuate but anyone with something to trade is getting out of the zones.

At night, when the Draculas don’t patrol, Bill will pull the truck up in front of some homestead, abandoned gas station or temporary camp and refugees will pull themselves into the truck bed with the scuttling silence of people who have lived their whole lives on the edge. Queenie usually sits in the back with them; refugees rarely carry weapons.

“Be careful,” says one refugee man, skinnier than Bill after his worst winter. Bill wishes that “care” was all he needed to survive out here.

&&&

Queenie takes a shot to the shoulder in Zone Two, on what should have been a routine sweep. There had been rumours, ever intensifying, that Disaster Boy, once known as Townie, was running Zone Two and taking on the Draculas one at a time.

Bill doubted much of it was true but it sounded like the kind of dumbass thing Disaster would do, or at least tell people he was doing. He broadens their sweeps to include Zone Two and tells Queenie to keep a look out.

They find whatever it is they’re looking for when Disaster tries to blow up the entire desert. A bright red and orange mushroom cloud bursts up into the night, so loud and sudden that Queenie is knocked to her knees, hands clapped to her ears. Bill ducks instinctively, hard enough to smack his forehead against the ancient steering wheel.

As soon as he’s recovered, he pulls the car around and floors it in the opposite direction. Queenie hits the deck just like she was taught and doesn’t look back, even when it becomes possible to hear bikes shrieking away from the explosion. Bill swerves on purpose a couple times, to avoid any laser shots.

Out of the growing cloud of ash, a bike pulls up alongside the truck. Bill has his laser on it within the space of a blink but it’s Disaster, grinning like a rabid wildcat. He’s not even wearing his fucking helmet.

“Heard you were in the area Longlegs!” he shouts.

The high pitched scream of an exterminator’s bike cuts through the rolling dust and ash. Even in the red glow of the explosion, Bill can see Disaster go pale white.

“Keep running!” He shouts, before pulling away and disappearing into the ash. Bill desperately tries to speed the truck up, hoping Queenie can stay down and hidden. Exterminators travel in packs.

Bill shivers and wishes the truck was faster or better or that he was a better shot. Running up against Exterminators are the worst nightmare of even the best zonerunners. Bill imagines that even the Killjoys wake up in cold sweats about a wolfpack of Extermintors coming after them.

The high pitched whine gets louder and then blurry grey shapes on motorbikes become visible through the ash cloud.

“Oh fuck, shit, shit, fuck, fuck,” Bill says through gritted teeth and yanks at the steering wheel, trying to pull them away from the ominous shapes.

In the rear view mirror, he sees Queenie pull herself up onto her knees, staying low and keeping her body protected by the side of the truck. She holds her laser steadily, her eyes tracking the shapes of the Exterminators. It’s the last resort. Exterminators don’t leave resistance alive.

Suddenly, the bright beams of laser shots shine through the cloud of ash. Bill can see clear daylight ahead of them, both a blessing and a curse. They’ll be easier to track in clear air but the exterminators will probably stay in the cloud, searching for Disaster. The shots go wild, streaking through the air and leaving heat spots on Bill’s vision. There’s terrible sizzling sound and a thump as Queenie falls backward into the truck. She screams. Bill doesn’t even make time in his panic to swear.

Through the fading ash, one of the exterminator’s turns to investigate Queenie’s screams. Bill yanks on the steering wheel, trying to turn them away and knowing, knowing that he is going to die, Queenie is going to die and everything, everything he has done for her will have been nothing.

Suddenly the lime green blur of Disaster’s bike screams through the pack of exterminators like a bowling ball through pins. They peel away after Disaster’s bike, until their shadows are swallowed completely by the ash cloud.

Bill wants nothing more than to pull over and see if Queenie’s alive but he knows that the exterminators could return at any moment to finish the kill. There is no choice but to go on.

&&&

Six clicks later, Bill pulls over to find that the laser had burned a thin hole clean through Queenie’s shoulder, cauterizing as it went. Queenie winces, still holding her hand over the wound. She’s bleeding, but only slightly.

“Dr. Feelgood?” Bill asks, lifting her out of the truck and helping her into the truck cab. She nods, her teeth clenched against the pain.

“How far?” She says, eyes watering. He knows what she looks like when she tries not to cry.

“15 clicks, give or take. We’ll be there before nightfall.” He nods and closes her door, crossing over to the driver door. She’s already laid as far back as she’s able and closed her eyes, trying to sleep.

They drive in silence for a long time. Queenie manages to dose but never fully sleep.

“Do you think Disaster made it?” She says, when they’re within sight of Dr. Feelgood’s hideout.

Bill nods.

“He made it.”

“How do you know?” Queenie says, trying to sit up.

“He would never have saved us if he thought there was a possibility that he could get hurt.” Bill says with a shrug. He’d loved Townie but the desert had made a realist of him, succeeding where the gutters had failed.

&&&

Dr. Feelgood’s triage center looks like ruins, but unlike most things in the desert, it’s dug in deep.

Bill spent a summer convalescing with the good doctor one summer, after the bike skid that ripped up his back. Feelgood had helped get Queenie with a runner who would look after her and operated on Bill’s spine until he could feel his toes again.

This time, Bill carries Queenie through the cellar door. She’s bit his shirt to stop from crying out and he can feel the top of her head bumping against his chin. The laser burn has reopened and she bleeds sluggishly.

“I want the doctor,” he says, to the first desert kid who tries to stop him. “I am Daddy Longlegs and I will sell your name to the nearest Dracula unless you get me the Doctor now.”

The desert kid blanches and then turns into a flat out run through swinging doors. Bill cradles Queenie against him and mentally shuffles through what he knows about the kids Feelgood buys for the promise of a motorbike when they’re through. By the time Feelgood’s stepped through his damned swinging doors, Bill’s got the kid’s first name on his tongue. Ready for what, he’s not sure.

&&&

It’s a clean wound, so Feelgood bandages her shoulder and sends them on their way. There’s little else he can do. There’s no space to keep her and no painkillers, disinfectant or antibiotics either. In fact, the only drugs Feelgood can get with any kind of regularity are the flicker pills that Never-Never takes to keep his mind from settling for too long. Feelgood gives them in massive doses to those too far gone.

He walks them out of the centre, letting Queenie lean on Bill instead of offering to help. Even among friends, help is not something freely given. He rests his hand on Bill’s shoulder as a goodbye.

“Keep that shoulder as clean as you can,” he says to Queenie. She nods before shrugging off from Bill’s support and limping to the side door and pulling herself into the truck bed, holster swinging and banging against her leg. Bill doesn’t move for a moment, watching Queenie settle.

“Desert take you footprints,” says Feelgood.

“And yours,” Bill says quietly.

&&&

“We’ll head for the outer zones,” he says, putting the car in gear as they drive away from Feelgood.

Queenie spits out the window and grits her teeth against the pain of jostling her shoulder.

“No way,” she says. “We can’t go out there”

“Why the hell not?” Bill says. Queenie readjusts her shoulder and rolls up the window as far as it’ll go. It doesn’t close.

“Zone Two’ll be a mess,” She gesturing with her uninjured arm. “No one else’ll have seen Disaster after that mess he made. We’ll be the only traders with news! Dad, come on, we’ll make enough to last us three winters!”

“Beans and credits aren’t worth anything if you’ve been ghosted,” Bill says, but without any anger in his voice. He hates admitting that she’s right but two clicks later when the road splits, he takes the city-bound fork.

&&&

Zone Two _is_ a mess. The runners are scattered, either fleeing or confused. No one knows if the massive explosion, which knocked out three of the city’s outer transmission towers and scattered dust and ash across the greater part of two zones, was a Dracula attack gone wrong or a runner gone mad. Bill finds his contacts, most of them in hiding while the zone calms down, and sells the information he has. It was Disaster Boy, the crazy fucker, goes the party line. Bill’s glad he got over profiting off other people’s ignorance a while ago, ‘cause they make a killing.

Queenie’s arm scabs over. She still moves slowly, a constant reminder to Bill that they are weakened. They are the herd animal with the limp. He knows the Exterminators are the sharks, the pride of lions, the desert wolves that take away children in the night.

Except you can’t make deals with desert wolves; they can’t be appeased. The outer gutter towns, far out enough to be considered separate settlements, used to give their children to the city in return for protection and permission to keep a few of their offspring with them. Bill knows that’s where the city got their Draculas before they ran out of slum dwellers and started mining the desert. He learned a long time ago that some information doesn’t sell.

He looks at Queenie, learning to cling to life with tooth and claw and willing to scratch out a life of ruthlessness in the desert. He doesn’t know if he regrets coming to the desert.

&&&

The Dracs keep coming further out. They see smoke on the horizon and when they sweep that sector four days later they find a water station burned to the ground. They walk it, looking for salvage but finding nothing, everything still smouldering. They see skeletons in the well house but Bill gives that memory to the desert and lets himself forget.

&&&

A week later, Bill takes them to skirt the remains of the gutter towns, hoping to hide in the shadow of the city. The battered grey truck, the same he inherited from Disaster when Queenie was still a wide-eyed toddler, is so coated with dust and soot and grime to be nearly invisible when set against the burned-out, desert-claimed gutter towns.

There’s salvage to be had, if you don’t mind taking from the dead. They scalp old electronics, mostly ident cards and scan readers. They’ll sell well if they can find runners who sometimes have to run into the city. If Bill’s contact is still good, he might even swing a meet with the Killjoys.

Bill tries to steer them away from gutter towns he used to work in, but he often can’t recognise them until too late. What looks like a burnt-out ghost town from the outside becomes the drug-club section he took Christine to on their first date, or the alleyways where he used to run with Ritalin rats. He grieves for them, for the people he knew who didn’t deserve to be wiped out. Somehow, he expects Queenie to feel the same, to see the graveyard in the shells of shanty towns but she’s never known the gutters. All she sees is salvage and tin walls that block her line of sight.

&&&

Holed up in one of the old shanty towns one night, he remembers that he still has his old ident card. There’s a still-functional scan reader a block from their den that Queenie couldn’t disconnect and he leaves Queenie asleep under the truck to spirit his way up there. It’s been long years since he was a spider and he’s well into his middle age, past the survival expectancy of even the best spiders. Without thinking, he slips easily into the step-slide of a spider, moving in shadows and under cover, putting obstacles between himself and entrance routes.

The scan reader screen’s been cracked and the top half flickers in the ashy grey light. He swipes his ident card and the screen lights up, the stark white of the Blind logo. He flinches but doesn’t run. Old and degraded speakers try desperately to produce the Blind jingle and the chattering of the host but only manage a demented baritone wail that cranks noisily before giving up.

He taps forcefully at the touch screen, taking him into the chat boards. He opens a public board and speaks clearly into the mic.

“Daddy Longlegs, for sale. Price high, goods worth it.” he says quickly, watches the words upload and then pulls his ident .The right people might see it or they might not, but he’s taken the first step. Queenie is still asleep when he returns and he beds down without waking her. She doesn’t need to know.

&&&

The betrayal rolls around in his head for weeks as they trawl the zones until it stops feeling like a betrayal. He looks at Queenie, seeing her dried skin and her sun-bleached hair turned rough as straw by years of sand and grit. He remembers holding her when they burned her mother at the desert shrine, her tiny fingers and her lungs always empty of screams.

&&&

Siren lives in an old refugee tent, always moving and always hiding. A week after Bill made the info post, they nearly run over her half-buried tent when they mount a bluff.

“Christ wept,” she says, coming out of the tent when Queenie forces the truck into a skid, so as not to kill anyone. “Who taught you to drive, a gutter rat?” She smiles though, her dust coloured teeth thin at the edges.

Bill hops down from the truck before Queenie and clasps arms with Siren.

“Desert take your footprints,” he says happily. Siren nods. “Who taught you to hide a tent anyway?” he says. “We nearly ran you over.”

Siren smiles again and laughs roughly. Everything about her is sand coloured, from her hair to her dusty coloured skin.

“Come inside, I’ve got goat meat,” She says, with the wary good-nature of a friend in the desert.

Queenie parks the truck in the shadow of the bluff alongside Siren’s tent. Bill is forced to bend nearly double to enter the tent, even when Siren holds the entry flap open as far as she can. Siren’s tent started out its life as one of the refugee tents from the nuclear camps, made of material intended to be hard-wearing and moisture-trapping, but it’s been patched and repaired so many times and now seems to be held together mostly by Siren’s stubbornness.

The light inside is dark and cool, tinted red, brown, light blue by the different plastics and fabrics of the tent. Siren feeds them well-cured goat meat and lets Bill run through the info he’s got for sale and then waves him off.

“I’m not buying anything, Longlegs,” she says, watching Queenie eat out of the corner of her eyes. Bill shrugs.

“I’ve got ident cards and scan readers as well,” he says but Siren just shudders.

“You know I don’t touch that stuff, Longlegs,” she says, curling her lip in disgust. “I can practically smell the city on you. Try the Killjoys, you know they run city raids sometimes. And eat your goat, it’s good for you.”

Bill eats, quickly and neatly, and drinks the offered goat milk.

Siren does end up doing some trade, goat meat for salvage blankets, and sends them on their way just after moon rise. Bill takes a moment to say goodbye while Queenie loads up the truck, chewing on a piece of goat meat as she loads the containers.

“She’s a good girl you’ve got,” Siren says, at the door to the tent. “Desert likes to keep the good ones. You be careful.”

“I heard your boy got ghosted.” Bill says, hearing experience in her words. “I’m sorry.”

Siren blinks slowly and turns her thin wedding band, obviously an unconscious tic.

“He got stupid. I’ve been writing him but like as not I’ll forget him soon.”

Bill nods. Forgetting the dead comes part and parcel with the desert.

“They forgive us.” He says. “The mailboxes are to remind us. The dead forgive us for forgetting them.” It was what Christine has always said when she sent letters to her dead sister.

Siren smiles.

“Not you, Longlegs. Runners on the Trailway tell me you still remember your girl’s mother.”

“Bits and pieces,” Bill confesses. “I’ve got a city memory.”

“Desert take your footprints.” She says and only nods when he responds.

“And yours,” He says, and then climbs into the truck’s cab. They kick up enough sand to completely hide Siren’s tent when he looks behind them.

&&&

It takes another month to offload the ident cards and scan readers, because Bill’s contact with the Killjoys is so old it’s practically stale and he has to jump through a million hoops to get his identity confirmed. He leaves Queenie with The Butcher when he goes to the three separate meets, because he refuses, point-blank to Party Poison’s face, to involve her. The Killjoys are too high-risk, too much of a target. He was 24 when the Scarecrow came into the desert and rained down destruction on every living thing that had ever come within 10 miles of the Killjoys, in retaliation for what they’d done in the tech factories. There are still craters in the Northern zones. Bill hasn’t forgotten.

His old contact was the Kobra Kid, a friend he’d met through Disaster, but they haven’t spoken, or fucked, in the years since the Killjoys and Bill stopped using the safe stations after Scarecrow. The safe stations used to be watering holes, where runners and desert people would meet to gossip and exchange laser batteries. Bill doesn’t stop by them anymore; he didn’t take his daughter out here to watch children starve because parents forgot they existed.

“Do you remember why you came to the desert?” Kobra asks, long after Bill’s finally unloaded the ident cards and scan readers on these paranoid crazies and they found a place to lie down together. They’re lying akimbo beside a dune, in one of the few soft sand parts of the desert, with Bill’s head pillowed on Kobra’s stomach and Kobra’s hands behind his head. Bill nods.

“She’s with me every day. I came here for Queenie.” He doesn’t trust Kobra Kid but the Killjoys are the closest thing the desert will ever have to a priest; lying together the closest thing to confession. Memory has always come easy to Bill. He remembers Queenie and everything else follows.

“She’s that much to you?” Kobra asks, sounding far away. Bill rolls over and holds himself up with the palms of his hands to look down at him, his blonde hair a light shadow against the soft sand. He thinks of Queenie as the tiny girl she had been, full of the desert sun and the songs of the city, and a memory of Kobra shirtless and lean in the light of a rising sun comes, almost unbidden, to the forefront of his mind.

Bill pauses and lays down so that the dark shadow of his hair touches Kobra’s. He thinks for a long moment about what to say.

“I loved her mother with everything I was. I thought we were going die together, burn the city down around us.” He says, speaking slowly. “When she died, I chose to live for Queenie instead.” He finishes.

His memories of the city are so much more vivid than those of the desert. Christine had been wild and so had he. The gutter towns and every sin they had to offer had been theirs for the taking.

“Do you remember?” Bill says quietly, regretting the question as soon as it passes his lips. He hears a sharp intake of breath, too deep to be a gasp, and can feel the sand shift slowly as Kobra shakes his head.

“I think Poison’s forgotten. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t think he wants us to know, that his memory’s failing. It makes him like everyone else.” Kobra sounds tired.

“Is that information for sale?”

“No,” Kobra says sharply and sits up. The knotted cord of his spine stands out, pushed up against the fabric of his tank top and Bill realises that the moon has risen. Bill reaches forward and presses his hand against a flat expanse of Kobra’s back.

“Moonrise.” Bill says. “I have to go.”

“Keep running.” Kobra says flatly. Bill nods but Kobra doesn’t turn around, even when Bill kicks up sand walking back to his truck.

&&&

Bill detours to the get-away mile without returning to Queenie, knowing exactly where his new hard credits are going.

Dreamkiller lives just a click west of the get-away mile, in an airstream trailer painted an awful shade of lime green. She’s crazy and her kid’s more Draculoid than human but her tech is so good even the city won’t touch her.

They say the child is Korse’s or she lay down with a Dracula and the kid came out missing pieces. They say she doesn’t have any of her own memories but she’ll steal your dreams and use those instead. The whole fucking desert is terrified of her but there isn’t a DJ in the zones who doesn’t use her tech.

She opens the door just as Bill climbs from the truck’s cab. She’s wearing a smog face mask and her eyes are so heavily made up as to appear alien, overly large and dark.

“I had heard that the spider was for sale,” she says, when he approaches, and it sounds like she’s smirking under the mask. Bill frowns but doesn’t deny it.

“I need a contact.” He says, standing in front of her door. At the top of the trailer’s steps, she towers over him.

“Come inside.” She says seriously and backs away from the door. The inside of the trailer is fanatically neat, with a clear workspace set up in the centre of the long room. As he enters, he sees, out of the corner of his eyes, a human figure hurry behind a partition.

There’s a jerry-rigged scan reader built into the wall of the trailer, with a bio-port beside. Dreamkiller practically throws herself into the chair, flicking her long black hair over her shoulder. She lifts her arms and Bill winces, seeing the ident card set deep into her forearm, until only the scan bar protrudes. She swipes it quickly and the screen flickers to life, the kind of personalised ident home that Bill hasn’t seen for years.

He’s backed up away from the screen so far that he can feel the edge of the trailer’s counters digging into the back of his legs. Dreamkiller turns to look at him, sweeping her hair away from her neck. He flinches when he realises what he thought was an odd scar is in fact a data-port. It looks like the graft didn’t take well and the skin around it is raw and scabbed, red as if she’s bled there recently.

She huffs under her breath when she sees him flinch.

“You never took a port, did you spider.” She says, her voice clear even from behind her mask. Bill shakes his head.

“Spiders didn’t take them. They made you easy to track.” He says. She shrugs.

“I didn’t take mine until I left the city. Feelgood did it for me.”

“Feelgood did that for you?” Bill asks, surprised.

“I paid well,” she says, reaching out and pulling the cord out of the wall’s bioport, twisting it until it connects to her neck port. Her eyes flutter closed and stay that way, although Bill can see her eyes move behind her eyelids.

“You should sit down,” says a voice. “She’ll be like that for a while.”

Bill jumps about twenty feet straight up into the air in surprise, turning with his hand going straight for his laser. He tries to unholster it but smacks his head on a cupboard so hard that the inside of the trailer blurs for a second.

When the world snaps back into focus, his laser is trained on a boy with short cropped black hair and deep tanned skin. Bill lowers his laser. He doesn’t think Dreamkiller would think much of him if he shot her kid.

“Fuck,” Bill says and sits down, more out of nervousness than anything else. Dreamkiller’s kid is alright but he gives Bill the creeps. Dreamkiller’s added to the kid’s biosystems so much that his memory is shot all to shit and he never remembers that he’s met Bill. He’s still creepy.

The kid stares at Bill for a few minutes, his half bionic eyes still and unblinking, before he clearly gets bored and wanders into the back of the airstream, out of sight. Bill rests his hand over his laser anyway. He tries not to tap his fingers in impatience.

Finally, as the limits of Bill’s patience begin to stretch, Dreamkiller begins to stir. The cord that runs from her neck to the wall slithers when she moves and then detaches, curling slowly back into the wall. She stretches, reaching above her head and threading her fingers together.

“It’s done,” she said. “Someone’ll meet you at the old cairns for tomorrow’s sunrise. I’ll take 20 in creds.”

Bill stands slowly and pulls out a thin fold of reader paper. She doesn’t snatch it but it’s close. He pauses in the doorway.

“You still in contact with Disaster?” He asks, over his shoulder. Dreamkiller nods jerkily, her eyes flicking to the partition that hides her son.

“He checks up on me,” She says slowly. Bill nods nervously.

“He should go to ground. Anyone who’s sold me stories as well. Tell him I told him to run, will you?”

“He won’t listen.” She says. Bill shrugs and lets it go. The door of the trailer swings closed behind him with a solid “thwack”. When he mounts the cab, he can see the dark eyes of a child staring out at him from one of the windows.

He starts the truck. He has 11 hours until sunrise and the old cairns are a long journey.

&&&

The old cairns stand out in the flat, barrenness of the high desert. The only other landmark is the thin snake of the get-away mile and, only visible on a clear stormless day, the hazy silhouette of the city, grey with smoke. No one knows where the old cairns came from or what sits underneath them but the nearest runner territory is five clicks in any direction. The air around them is charged and humid, even at night or on a windy day. Not even the breeze dares to pass over the cairns.

Sunrise is not far away and the sky is starting to lighten, turning a soft grey colour, when Bill passes by the cairns in the truck. He’s holstered his emergency lasers and tied a knife to his belt, in case fighting gets close. He’s a decent shot with a laser but when things get tense, he prefers the heft of a knife blade. There hadn’t been room in the city for laser fights and the chosen weapon of a spider had always been a knife. A spider on a job so fucked he had to start killing needed to do it quickly and, most of all, quietly.

He parks the truck behind a bluff, far enough away that, if he’s ghosted, the Dracs probably won’t go looking for it. The walk, brisk across the rough brush of the high desert, fills Bill’s wheezy lungs with desert air and forces him to focus on his feet, not the meet.

He grips his laser tightly. Queenie had painted it, when he had upgraded from the old Zero G batteries to the Stinger models. He remembers what he said to Kobra.

Six Draculoids step out from behind the first cairn and Bill freezes, his other hand falling down to rest over his left laser. The Dracs don’t even pull their own weapons. They’ve sent a kill squad, not even bothered to take up his offer with anything but execution and Bill’s desperately running his odds of escape, of surviving to return to Queenie, when Korse steps out from behind the cairn.

The small part of Bill’s mind not gibbering in terror observes coldly that it’s a good entrance, impressive when he steps through the ranks of Dracs but not overly showy. Korse stops several paces too far for conversation, forcing Bill to take the final steps.

“What is your price?” Korse says coldly. Bill shudders. His voice is grating, like rubbing a knife along a bone.

“My daughter.” Bill says. His voice sounds thin, not even echoing among the cairns.  
Korse raises an eyebrow.

“Our records indicate that your daughter is a traitor of the city. She is not ours to give to you, nor would Blind consent to sell one of its citizens into desert slavery, no matter the intelligence you offer.”

Bill bristles.

“I’m not asking you to _sell_ her,” Bill starts but is waved aside by Korse.

“Please state the nature of the transaction or I will end this now.” He says, no more coldly than a man would ask for a favour even though Bill knows that ending the meeting would mean killing him. Bill tries to muster himself.

“I want a place in the city for my daughter. A good place, with a family, and not in the gutters.” Bill says. “I want her to be safe.”

Korse seems on the verge of inspecting his nails.

“That is a high price.” He says. Bill nods.

“I have locations, family history and in-depth intelligence on every zonerunner in the desert.” Korse flinches almost imperceptibly, which Bill imagines must be his equivalent of shouting.

“What is your name?” He asks harshly, his dead eyes moving to meet Bill’s.

“They call me Daddy Longlegs.”

Korse moves again, swaying as if pushed by the breeze.

“You are the desert spider?” He asks, eyes locked on him. Bill is forced to look down and away to avoid them. He doesn’t respond. Finally, out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Korse nod jerkily.

“Your payment is sufficient, William Beckett. Blind is thankful for your loyalty to the great metropolis of Battery City and are glad to welcome the young misled Genevieve Beckett into our open arms. I will extract the payment now.”

Bill only has time to flinch at the casual use of names and say, plaintively, “her name is _Queenie_ ,” before he truly parses what he’s just heard. Korse has already stepped forward, closing the distance between them alarmingly quickly and grabbing at Bill’s head. He tries to duck and reach for his knife but he’s too late and too slow.

The pain is overwhelming, more painful that his bike skid, more painful than Christine’s funeral, more painful than desert sun on a sunburn. He screams and, distantly, he can feel his body shaking, see the world through eyes he cannot close. Losing consciousness is soothing, like falling asleep.

&&&

Bill wakes choking. He tries to scream but sand and dirt catch in his throat, throwing him into wakefulness as he scratches at his neck and fights to breathe.

“Woah, Longlegs, cool it,” says a familiar voice, helping him to sit up and cough. Bill struggles to open his heavy eyes and sees Disaster leaning over him. The sand is burning hot against his skin.

“Queenie?” he coughs, when he’s gagged on enough sand to be able to breathe. He takes Disaster’s extended hand.

“She’s fine,” Disaster says, helping him to stand. “She’s still with the Butcher.”

Bill lets out a breath he’d hadn’t known he was holding. He’s too shaky to stand, leaning heavily against Disaster. Wind whistles through the cairns.

“Where’s the truck?” Disaster asks, when Bill seems to have steadied. He points shakily.

“Behind the bluff,” Bill says and takes a faltering step forward, trusting himself to manage the walk when he doesn’t fall on the first step. Disaster walks with a runner’s rolling stride, desperate to get out of the open but too proud to run or to have anyone see him running. The walk stretches Bill’s unused legs and steadies his mind. He hadn’t realised the rumours that Exterminators could steal the memories right out of your head were true.

When they arrive, he’s forced to lean against the truck’s siding and breathe, feeling the rasp of sand in his throat. Did Korse intend for him to live? Did he leave him to die to destroy the evidence?

“How’d you find me?” Bill rasps. He has to double check his balance when he realises he’s looking _up_ at Disaster. His lean had become a slump.

Disaster is as pale as he gets under the desert grime, his eyebrows knitted together in worry. He’s older than Bill remembers, although Bill remembers him with a smile, the last time they saw each other. Queenie had been eight and had recently broken her arm.

“I was at Dreamkiller’s. She said you’d be out at the old cairns, doing something stupid.”

“It wasn’t stupid,” Bill says, pulling himself upright and squaring his shoulders.

“Yeah, that statement would carry a lot more wait if you were able to stand on your own,” Disaster says. Bill rolls his eyes, even though it makes his head hurt. “What the fuck where you doing?”

“A deal,” Bill says, finally trusting himself to step away from the truck.

“Without Queenie? Longlegs, you’ve been taking her on deals since she could walk.”

Bill shakes his head and moves to pull the truck door open, only to find Disaster’s hand holding it closed. He considers trying to pull it open anyway but stops; he would definitely not win against Disaster in a contest of arms.

“Longlegs, fuck this, you trying to get yourself killed? No runner does deals on the old cairns.”

Bill takes a second to search any remaining moisture out in his mouth and spit. He doesn’t answer. He’s sure Disaster can figure it out for himself.

“Fuck, Longlegs, you dealing with Draculas?”

Bill wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and lets his eyes skitter away from Disaster’s.

“Exterminators,” Bill corrects when he’s sure he’s got Disaster’s attention. “Dealing with Exterminators.”

“Fuck me.” Disaster swears eloquently. “What are you even selling that those fuckers want?”

Bill blinks and forces himself to meet Disaster’s eyes.

“What’d you think I’m selling, Disaster?” Bill asks, half-sneering. He’s never known Disaster to lie to himself like this. Bill can see the exact second when Disaster realises because he stops moving, completely freezes.

“They always said you had the best memory in the desert.”

Bill looks down.

“It’s for Queenie.” He says. He knows that it doesn’t redeem him but it’s better than nothing.

“People will die because of what you’ve done,” Disaster says.

Bill nods.

“Yes.” He says. He’s made his peace with that.

“And you’re okay with that?” Disaster says angrily, taking a half step forward.

Bill shrugs.

“I’ve killed men before, Townie.”

“Don’t call me that,” Disaster snaps, his teeth clacking. He makes a face, true disgust colouring his eyes. “Queenie will never forgive you. Can you live with that? Your daughter will hate you for the rest of her days.”

Bill smiles.

“Queenie won’t remember me,” he says, knowing that he’s won. “They’ll wipe her memories and feed her a story about growing up in the city. She’ll have a new family, maybe even a brother and a sister. Queenie won’t hate me. She won’t even remember me.”

Disaster looks horrified.

“Longlegs,” he says. His voice cracks slightly.

“She’s going to be safe, Townie. She’s going to grow old and have children and fall in love and she’s going to be safe.”

“Longlegs,” Disaster says, “Bill, how can you, how can you make her forget?”

“She’ll forget anyway!” He shouts. “Look at Never-Never, out here so long he can’t remember his own name, can’t remember the name of the woman who loved him. The desert makes you forget, and it does it slow. Better she forgets all at once. It doesn’t hurt like that.”

Disaster looks down and then away, refusing to make eye contact.

“Where will you go?” He asks.

“Into the storms,” Bill says and doesn’t flinch when Disaster doesn’t even look at him. Neither of them add “if the city lets you live.”

&&&

Genevieve Beckett woke up one morning and she’d had the strangest dream. She tried to remember it, to tell her mother, but by the time her mother had returned from her info injection, all Genevieve could remember was the smell of hot sand and the shape of a man holding her hand and calling her Queenie.

 

 


End file.
